


i've been twisting to the moon and sun

by peppermintflower (dragonet)



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Bottom Liam, Boys Kissing, Fingerfucking, M/M, Metafiction, Pining, Top Zayn, bookstore!liam, lonely liam, nomad!zayn, poor baby, pretentious af, they're so in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 21:50:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6167941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonet/pseuds/peppermintflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn never calls. Liam's linoleum is wearing out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i've been twisting to the moon and sun

**Author's Note:**

> AN: soooo this is my usual dose of rambly rubbish. But I think it's kind of cool. So like. Tell me what you think or something!

Liam watches the stars move through his skylight. He watches weeks and months and years pass and the stars come back around and the moon passes overhead, it wanes colder and warmer through the seasons, and one side of his bed is empty.

In another life everything he did meant something. It was shared with someone else and every success was a celebration and every downfall came with a hug. He can’t remember how that feels now.

Every morning he drinks a cup of coffee while he stares over the city’s rooftops. It’s never hot in his flat even in summer. The linoleum is cracking in the kitchenette. He rubs his toes against each other absently.

When his coffee cup is clean and dry and back in the cupboard, he goes downstairs and opens the shop. Occasionally he tries to shift a few books or even put them on the shelves, but they all end up back in their original places by lunchtime. It’s perplexing. He might have a poltergeist.

It’s nearly Christmas. Liam hung a few baubles in the window to show willing but he’s not really interested, him alone in this dusty old shop with only his books and the screaming floorboards for company. Perhaps in another life he would’ve spent time with his family but nowadays all his calls go to answerphone and he’s stopped listening to his mother’s increasing messages.

It’s been a week a month two months six months a year two years four years since anything. It’s been a week a month six months since he saw Niall. It’s been a month six months a year since he stopped returning Harry’s calls. It’s been a year two years four years since he laughed with Louis.

It’s been eight months since he heard from Zayn. The last thing Liam has of him is the note on the fridge, sandwiched between an alphabet letter Z and a picture of Thorpe Park. It says, _I’m going off again. Don’t know when I’ll be home. I’ll keep in touch. I love you. Z xxx_

Liam hasn’t touched it in eight months. He’s been using the mini fridge in the backroom of the shop.

It gets like this when Zayn is away. Places and parts of Liam’s apartment which bear pockets of him cannot be disturbed; Liam has moved away from his favourite beanbag because it smells of Zayn’s cologne and he doesn’t want to wear it out, wants to be able to put his face into the orange corduroy any time he wants and smell Zayn.

He hasn’t been in touch. Zayn’s Facebook is a nuclear wasteland of pictures from five six seven years ago. Liam is in some of them; Louis’ wedding, Niall’s twenty-first, both covered in cake; Harry’s leaving party, dressed as a carrot for some reason lost to time. As far as Liam can tell, Zayn hasn’t logged onto it in years. His mobile phone, which Liam pays for free roaming so that they can keep in touch, is switched off. He hasn’t replied to any emails.

During the darkest nights Liam watches the red lights of the city bounce off low cloud and imagines Zayn dead. Imagines him in Istanbul, stabbed in a dark street and choking, gasping in his own blood, clutching his wounds. Imagines him in Canada, face-down in a cold blue lake, watching the water weed and stones with fish-eaten eyes. Imagines him bitten by spiders in Australia, malaria-ridden mosquitoes in India, poisoned in China, dying slowly of disease in one of the middle African countries. Not that he has any idea where Zayn is or has been.

In the shop he serves the usual Christmas shoppers who can’t be bothered to seek out Waterstones on Oxford Street and instead dive into a grimy little shop sandwiched between Greggs and a beauty parlour. He sells two books on astrology and a pamphlet the local Kingdom Hall dropped in two weeks ago. He’s not supposed to charge for the pamphlets but just doesn’t refuse the money the woman puts into his hand.

Liam writes an email to Zayn that he doesn’t send. It says, _please come home_.

He gets a call from Niall, living just across town, inviting him for Christmas Day. Liam says he’ll think about it because he can’t find a polite way to say no.

On Christmas Day a few pathetic flecks of snow fall from the sky. Liam eats hot chocolate powder mixed with almond milk for lunch and wonders if Zayn will knock on the door.

When he does, there is no poetry. It is a totally ordinary day in February and it is raining. Liam is reading the newest mystery thriller and eating discount caramel chocolates. Perhaps he should have been a writer.

The shop door opens and closes and Liam turns a page.

A sixth sense makes him look up and Zayn is there, scruffier and more tired and wearing the same hopeful half-smirk as when he asked Liam, all those years ago, if he’d _like to go out, sometime, you know, like a date._

They don’t need to talk when Zayn comes home. Liam flips the sign to closed and buries himself in Zayn, in the dear smell of his hair and his sweet eyes and his mouth. He smells like somewhere hot and unknown but he tastes like home.

“I-” Zayn tries to say around Liam’s lips but Liam draws him back with a hand in his hair and they sink to the floor by the Non-Fiction section.

Later they playfight in the ruins of Liam’s bed until the empty side is forgotten and Zayn’s fingers are buried to the knuckle in Liam and their mingled gasps rise like smoke out of the skylight. And when Zayn is moving Liam feels the earth move, groans from somewhere deep within him and can’t stop the tears, can’t stop himself reaching out for Zayn until they’re rocking helplessly, so close together and so entwined, and Zayn spills into Liam with a soft gasp of his name.


End file.
